


Bending Beckham

by Devilc



Category: The Hurt Locker
Genre: Character of Color, Community: eid_fic, Gen, Muslim Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:46:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devilc/pseuds/Devilc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of five "what ifs".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bending Beckham

**Author's Note:**

> According to several "is it Eid yet" websites, it is, indeed, Eid where I live, so I'm posting while I've got a moment.
> 
> Written for Eid_Ka_Chand's annual fanworks challenge, and with loving memory for my mother's host family, who made her first Eid with them so special and memorable.

In Arabic he writes and says his full name as Daoud Raheem Yusuf.

In the West, he discovers, they give names differently. You can introduce yourself as Daoud Raheem Yusuf, but generally speaking, you don't give your name, your father's name, and your grandfather's name when asked what your full name is. You give your First Name and Last Name, and in Iraq, closest thing to a western Last Name (sometimes called a Surname) is your Clan Name.

He picks up his pen and carefully writes Daoud al-Beidhan. He shivers a little, seeing it there in the Roman alphabet . Whispers it under his breath, pronouncing it the way he thinks it would be said by somebody speaking English.

A possibility occurs to him.

~~Daoud al-Beidhan~~

David Beckham.

Daoud Raheem Yusuf is 11 years old and David Beckham is his hero and someday, Daoud will play professional football and have a famous and beautiful wife just like David Beckham. He studies very hard in his English classes for this reason. He will play football (and speak English) as good as Beckham, and the world will cheer whenever he steps out on to the field.

\-----  
**What If -- The First**  
\-----

The frenzied hum of the vuvuzelas makes him think of a thousand wasps. No, a thousand thousand wasps, all pouring out of their nests, buzzing everywhere, looking to strike.

Daoud can't quite believe he's here at the FIFA World Cup 2010. A month ago, South Africa was a place on the map. _Far away on the map_. And now he's here!

Oh, he's not playing.

(But he still plays. Starts for his team, too.)

(And only a few close friends and family are still allowed to call him Beckham.)

Daoud's here because he's one of the winners of a contest Al'Jazeera sponsored for young journalists. All that studying hard in English classes has really paid off. Not only has he taken his first plane trip and gotten to see the length and breadth of South Africa -- and the beauty of the mountains takes his breath away after the long, low, endless _flatness_ of Iraq -- but he's gotten to do "meet and greets" with several of the teams and even interview a few famous players.

(He talked to the US national team. None of them seemed to remember the UN Inspection tensions of 2002-3 and Bush's threats of invasion. Then again, they weren't the ones with an army camped on their borders. They were nice enough, though, and Daoud wants to see Las Vegas some day, because Herculez Gomez, one of the forwards, made it seem like so much more than just "Sin City.")

Uruguay takes the field. The roar of the crowd and the buzz of the vuvuzelas becomes something beyond sound. Something _felt_ more than heard.

Daoud hopes to get an interview with Diego Forlan.

\----  
**What If -- The Second**  
\----

Two weeks after Daoud writes "David Beckham" at the top of his paper, the world changes when the Americans invade Iraq.

But Daoud doesn't wake up early on that cool March morning, sneak out the door of the house, shinny over the wall of his family's compound, and slip down to the new irrigation works his father's team has just completed, curious to see if any minnows or tadpoles have moved in yet. He doesn't follow a large, iridescent blue-violet dragonfly out into the older works, which are full of reeds and always have frogs and tadpoles.

(His father's the local manager for the water works, and for some reason, though he's happy to take Daoud along and show him how it all works, he doesn't want Daoud going down to the new works to play. He probably thinks Daoud's going to open a lock or a gate or break something and screw up the water flow. Daoud knows better than to play with any of the gates or levers. He's not stupid.)

He's asleep in his bed beneath a large poster of David Beckham when a US First Recon Marine Captain (one given a disparaging nickname by his troops) calls in an airstrike against a hostile village and gets the coordinates wrong by two grid squares.

Nothing, not even a dog, survives.

\-----  
**What If -- The Third**  
\-----

Two weeks after Daoud wrote "David Beckham" at the top of his paper, the world changed when the Americans invaded Iraq and his village was _erased_ by an airstrike. His parents wouldn't let him out of the family compound for fear that something bad would happen. Jumpy soldiers tended to shoot everything that moved, and Mom and Dad didn't want an accident to happen, so they kept him inside, telling him that when things had quieted down in a month or two, then he could come and go as he used to.

In the gray pre-dawn light he slipped down to the irrigation canals, avoiding the newer works because they didn't have anything interesting in them yet, and wandered to some that were older than him, and waited for the dragonflies to wake up and the minnows and tadpoles to start darting about. He ended up following a large blue-violet dragonfly with large orange eyes for several minutes, and it led him deep into the irrigation works.

It's the only reason he's still alive.

He wandered for about a month before the old man took him in. He got a place to sleep, food to eat, and about a dollar a day for helping sell DVDs and other things to the American soldiers.

When he turned 15, and started to fill in after the growth spurt that broadened his shoulders and deepened his voice (and gave him bigger hands, and feet that he kept tripping over as he tried to play a little football) Beckham made a different kind of sale.

Himself.

He ran after the soldier, offering two DVDs -- real hot shit -- for $20, when the soldier stopped and his hard, _flat_ eyes looked Beckham up and down in a way that made his blood curdle.

"How about $20 for you to suck my dick?" Voice low, barely above a whisper.

Urgent.

Not a joke.

Beckham did the math and said yes.

And yes again. And again. And again. Until the old man figured it out and/or couldn't look the other way anymore and gave Beckham the boot.

But that was okay, because by that point, Beckham had made some other friends (people in the foreign press and civilian contractors) and through them he found out where the action really was.

He's had clothes now. Good clothes. _The right kind of clothes._

The kind of clothes that let him into the lobbies and lounges and restaurants of the expensive hotels where the foreigners stay. Where there were echoes of what cosmopolitan (also his new favorite alcoholic drink) Iraq used to be like.

He shared a cool, slightly dank room in the basement of one of the hotels with three women and another guy, Aziz, and they paid 50% of their take to the manager for the privilege.

(There used to be four women, but he's pretty sure that Zainab tried to cheat the manager. Either way, she left one night and ended up beaten to death in an alley and had the word "whore" carved across her belly.)

None of them had any illusions about what will happen when the Americans and their Coalition give up and leave.

No illusions.

No dreams.

No hope.

But they each had one more day.

(And that's more than their families ever got.)

 

\----  
**What If -- The Fourth**  
\----

Staff Sergent James is not stressed out and delusional. That is Beckham, there, on the table, murdered by insurgents, body desecrated and turned into an IED.

James breaks into the morgue the next day, finds him, wraps him in yet another sheet and throws him in the back of the hummer.

The smell of the body makes Sanborn and Eldridge vomit, but they both understand why James has got to do this.

The hole they dig is good and deep, and James lays Beckham out and tucks in a few pieces of the triggering mechanism and a football before they wrap him again in the sheet, and shovel the earth over him, and build a small cairn of rocks. Sanborn says, "The kid deserved better than this." James nods silently.

The patch of ground they pick is dry and highly saline and the cotton sheet works well to help wick away the moisture of decomposition, stopping it before it can really start.

One thousand years later, an archaeological team from the local university can explain in great detail the processes that preserved his body, what killed him (sharp blow to the back of the head), and, based on trace minerals in his teeth and bones they can say he died between 2002 and 2005.

However, they have no idea why a 12 year old boy ended up buried with his right arm around a football -- hugging it close -- while his left hand contained a 12cm length of detonation cord, a blasting cap, and a mercury switch.

Not only is it the strangest combination of grave goods they've ever seen, but they had to call in a local EOD technician to render the site safe before they could continue with the dig.

\-----  
**What If -- The Fifth**  
\-----

When Beckham turns 14, Malik Hussein Tariq (the old man who took him in in the days after an airstrike destroyed his family's compound) says it's too dangerous to stay here in front of the base selling to the Americans. There have been reprisals. Also, both of them have heard rumors that the Americans are going to clear the merchants from the front of the base for security reasons.

Malik says that he's gotten word from a long lost cousin, Jamal, who's ended up about 160 KM southeast of here. Before the invasion, Jamal was an accountant, but he's somehow ended up with a farm. He grows dates and melons, and he wants Malik, the closest family member he's been able to find, to come and help him.

"You should come, Beckham," Malik says with a fond smile, "It will do you good to be out of this place. It will do both of us good to find a better place."

He's trying to keep it light, casual, calling him Beckham and not Daoud, but Beckham can see that the old man has made up his mind and will go with or without him.

Beckham says yes.

It's hard work, and Beckham almost comes to hate the cantaloupes, casabas, and watermelons that grow in Jamal's fields, except for the fact that there's nothing like a plate of cool, fresh melon at the end of a long, hot day. And, Fatima, Jamal's wife, makes the best lentil stew and flatbread he's ever tasted.

There are other boys, other farmer's sons, and in his free time, they get together and play a little football. Everybody laughs about his nickname ... the good way.

Their first harvest is good, and it stays good. Jamal and Malik give him a new pair of shoes and two sets of clothes for his second Eid there. Fatima teases him about how much he's growing. Jamal laughs and says that it's her good cooking that's to blame for Daoud's growth spurt.

And then, when he turns 16, it's as if he sees Farrah, Jahmal and Fatima's daughter (their only surviving child) for the first time.

He doesn't see the foot that was broken and twisted as the result of the RPG attack that killed her sister and brother.

He sees only her great, dark eyes, and the soft, ink-black curls that constantly escape her scarf. And it's not just hunger talking when he says he thinks her tabbouleh is better than her mom's.

When he's 18, and has completed three months of work on the system of ditches and gates that will make better use of Jamal's water allotment and allow him to increase his planting by at least 1/3, (a project that was Daoud's idea, by the way) he screws his courage to the sticking place and asks _the_ question.

To his and Farrah's immense relief, the answer is yes.


End file.
